Pomona College Museum of Art Awarded $220,000 Getty Foundation Grant

Pomona College Museum of Art Awarded $220,000 Getty Foundation Grant

The Pomona College Museum of Art has been awarded a $220,000 Getty Foundation grant for the future exhibition “It Happened at Pomona: Art at Pomona College 1969-1973” under the Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative. The exhibition will focus on the intensely creative period from 1969 to 1973, when the Pomona College Museum of Art (then the Pomona College Gallery) presented some of the most experimental exhibitions of contemporary art in Los Angeles. The Pomona College Museum and Art Department served as an incubator for artists like Pomona alumni Chris Burden, James Turrell and Mowry Baden, among others. Pomona College’s exhibition of groundbreaking artworks (by Michael Asher, Jack Goldstein, and Allen Ruppersberg, for example) that integrated the legacy of Minimalism with the more contemporary concerns of Conceptualism formed the educational backdrop for a generation of artists who spent their formative years in Los Angeles.

Scheduled to open August 30, 2011 and to run through May 13, 2012, the “It Happened at Pomona” exhibition and accompanying catalogue will place projects developed at Pomona College in the context of a transformative moment in the Los Angeles art world, while also providing insight on how contact between Los Angeles and New York shaped art history.

The grant to Pomona College is one of 26 grants—totaling nearly $3.1 million—that will launch an unprecedented series of concurrent exhibitions at museums throughout Southern California starting in Fall 2011. Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, a joint initiative of the Getty Foundation and the Getty Research Institute, aims to document the history of art in the region’s vibrant post-World War II decades, and will be a unique opportunity for audiences to explore and celebrate L.A.’s artistic legacy.